When you are new at setting up a membership site there are tons of questions. Knowing what key features will benefit your ability to run the membership site will save you headaches, time and money in the long run. Read this article to discover some of the key features any successful membership site should have.

Perhaps one of the biggest regarding saving you time and frustration is having automatic member sign up (registration) for new membership site members. You don't want someone who joins at 2 in the morning to have to wait until you wake up in order to complete the registration, be activated so that they can enjoy the membership site benefits. When someone decides to join your membership you want him or her to be able to feel good about the decision right from the start and automatic member sign up allows them to have instant access to the membership site so that they can immediately enjoy the site and feel good about their membership purchase.

Automatic payment, and automatic activation for paid accounts goes along with the first reason. If everything is correct with their signup regarding registration, and payment you want them to have access right away to the goods and services they paid for as soon as the payment has gone through. This can only be done with automatic process systems.

You should have a welcome email with pertinent membership site information contained in it. A lost password feature should be prominent on the sign in page and also in the welcome email to assure the new member that they will always be able to access the membership site that they just paid for.

Membership sites that offer an affiliate program having a multiple tier feature allow members to make more money faster. Affiliates also need a great compensation (pay) plan as reward for promoting your membership site. Making sure you have an adequate payment system is one feature you should not skimp on. You should make sure that the payment to your affiliate is instant such as instant direct payments. This also frees you up from book keeping and tax reporting duties. You also want to be sure that the payment feature is secure, so there is no possible way to "cheat" their way into your membership site. Does your payment system support the most popular payment options?

Does the script come with a plug 'n play Website template?

Make sure that the script is not a difficult one to install and run and that there is plenty of technical support in case you do run into any problems.

That brings us to one of the most important features of your script and that is support! A script is only as good as the support behind it. If and when a script fails, if you don't have the script developer's support it can be a harrowing experience if the script is at all complicated. A good way to discoverhow good the support is before you buy? Call support and ask some pre-purchase questions about the script. Do you receive "canned" answers or do they take the time to really explain things to you? Their response to you will tell you a lot about how important they think customer support is to their product.

Make sure you have a good FAQ pages, lost password pages, registration pages and login page features.